Summer Exhibit

Mark Beard and Corinne Robbins Opening Reception June 24th 5-7pm

Carrie Haddad Gallery is pleased to present our summer exhibit, a group show of paintings by Mark Beard and Corinne Robbins, as well as works on paper by Claire Lofrese, Anne Francey, Sue Bryan, David Seiler, and the duo Kahn & Selesnick. The exhibit will be on view June 21 – Aug. 6 with a reception for the artists on Saturday, June 24 from 5 – 7 p.m.

This marks the debut exhibit of Caanan-based painter Corinne Robbins. The back room will feature a selection of oil paintings on canvas from 2012 – 2017. Boldly graphic in color and form, with a tactility you can almost taste, her paintings capture the very essence of the landscape where she lives. Her creative methods are shaped by inherent artistic inclination as well as pedagogical influence, the latter having occurred in Bennington College before completing her MFA at Hunter College. “I like to think of my work as liminal, not fully abstract and not exactly realistic,” she explains.

Like an improvisational performance, these “liminal” paintings are both started and finished in one fluent session. Her process begins with a simple line drawing on white canvas. She then uses her pallet knife to fill in blocks of color, each hue present in and crucial to the blending of the next. The result is a thoughtful pattern of raw, abstracted shapes that are grounded in the horizon line or in a thicket of triangular-shaped pine trees. By means of stylized imagery, Robbins shares a gritty interpretation of the Hudson Valley landscape.

Mark Beard returns to Carrie Haddad Gallery this summer with works attributed to his highly popular and fictional persona “Bruce Sargeant.” Sargeant’s signature male figure and portrait paintings, circa 1920s and ’30s in Beard’s narrative, celebrate traditionally masculine themes such as athletics and exploration. Combining this with intense homoeroticism, which is conveyed through the partially- or totally-undressed state of his subjects, Beard maintains the firm sense of artistic identity that has kept his work in high demand throughout his career. In 2016, Beard was featured in a group exhibit titled SAFARIS at a most appropriate venue—Musee de la chasse et de la nature, or Museum of Hunting and Nature—in Paris. The exhibit aimed to make the most banal hunting grounds seem more wild, more dangerous, more exotic, “bestowing the hunt with intangible surges of heroism.” You can imagine that Beard’s sex pots clothed in khaki, armed with rifles and wrestling with tigers were very well received. We are pleased to include a few of these hunters from this series in our exhibit here in Hudson, NY. Also on view will be framed graphite drawings of male nudes on Arches paper from the artist’s popular Thursday night sketch sessions from live models.

Collaborative duo Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick’s fantastical saga of the cabaret troupe, Truppe Fledermaus, continues with a new project entitled “Madame Lulu’s Book of Fate.” The recently completed series of 19 x 13-inch tarot card drawings in watercolor and gouache explores the notion of the carnivalesque, presenting each figure through a lens of absurdity and upended societal norms. With carnival characters flamboyantly costumed to represent each card in a tarot deck, the Truppe invites you to consider: is it the carnival that is upside-down, or perhaps the real world that purports to burlesque? This exhibit will include a selection of 7 framed drawings, alongside several small, terracotta sculpture, while the complete tarot deck of 78 cards will be available for purchase in October 2017.

The center gallery will feature a selection of works on paper by several gallery artists. The moody charcoal landscapes in miniature format by Sue Bryan have delighted art lovers since she joined the roster in 2016. With an exquisitely detailed use of charcoal and carbon pencil, Bryan achieves luminous displays of light cast onto mingled trees, dirt paved country roads, and forest vignettes. The postage stamp- sized landscapes have the capacity to engage as much as the larger sized drawings, demonstrating the power between subject and scale. Claire Lofrese will show new work from her Morandi series; a set of black and white giclée prints that are enlargements of original monotypes created in imitation of Giorgio Morandi’s still-life paintings. Lofrese isolates commonplace vessels against a crisp white background using printmaking techniques. Experimenting with slightly more dramatic gradations in tone and texture, she elicits dimension out of the otherwise-flat images. Finished in white shadow box frames, Lofrese puts forward a fresh approach to portraying humble objects. The free-flowing, expressive line work commonly found in Anne Francey’s paintings and works on paper are inspired by an Islamic aesthetic that is deeply rooted in nature. Flowering buds, seed pods and birds are represented in the Seismography Series with delicate, calligraphic white lines against opaque black ink. Gestural lines seeking to record their natural counterparts are inevitably abstracted by the artist’s unrestricted, free-hand drawing technique. David Seiler operates in the space between painting and photograph, applying a distinctive artistic method to portraits of flowers. The magnolia blossom with its stem trailing off the panel’s surface is built through photomontage, layering pieces of the same image represented in varying tonalities. The image of the flower itself remains continuous while texture and tone are broken down by the subtle, sepia toned patchwork element. The dusty monochromatic palette distills a vintage quality; evidence of wear and tear speckles the background and mimics the crinkled texture in the poppy petals. Each work is presented on a solid, wood panel that further grounds the delicate imagery of fleeting blooms.

Sue Bryan

Established in 1991, Carrie Haddad Gallery represents mid-career and emerging artists of the Hudson Valley and beyond working in painting, sculpture, mixed media and photography. We organize 7 group exhibits per year in a 3000 square foot gallery space on Hudson's Warren Street.